wanderlust

When a Wanderess has been caged, or perched with her wings clipped, She lives like a Stoic, She lives most heroic, smiling with ruby, moistened lips once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.

I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.

I don't know where I am going, I just know I had to leave. Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.

I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.

The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

and we laugh and laugh andall I know isat this moment I feel likeI can do anything I wantand be anyone I wantand go anywhere on the globeand still call it home

Paradise was always over there, a day__ sail away. But it__ a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin__ terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.

This was what my spirit longed to do, to wander in strange lands. It couldn't stand being trapped in one body all the time. It had wanderlust.

There__ something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.

Wanderlust is incurable.

Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

I ease into the idea of letting go of control and simply let life take the reins. And when I don't hold it so tightly, it doesn't thrash against me so wildly. It calms to a trot and allows me to take in the scenery, experience love, and learn what is important in this world: people, places, memories__ot things or perceptions.

I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it__ a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

What I love is how seamless everything is. You walk throw a forest and come out in a village; and there__ no difference, no division. You aren__ in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.

It was the inverse of an island in the sea.

Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits--the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.